BT - Chapter 12

8 years later

Okay, but that was almost ten

Amber Krowen years ago now since

Bethany had been freed from the

Systems Alliance occupation, and some of the organizations that were part of Kaisara's plan to create the

Sun Jin Empire paid for it. They spent so much on Bethany’s battle that the Alliance managed to take down several of the rebelling strongholds around the region. They were either unguarded or under-armed stations and planets. This just encouraged more groups to join Kaisara in the war effort, creating that old vicious cycle. More and more of the scattered political entities saw the counter-attacks from the Systems Alliance as too aggressive and rallied to Sun Jin Kaisara's cause.

Now the game is starting anew. For years the Sun Jin Empire was way behind in military might, but they've been quietly creating powerful weapons while the Systems Alliance wasn't taking the threat seriously enough. We were just another uprising with a protracted battle, nothing to commit large amounts of resources to, right? When the time was right the Sun Jin Empire added their newest piece to the board: the fleet. Built completely in hiding for years. The SJE's fleet rapidly became more and more advanced with remarkable breakthroughs in stealth, armor, firepower, and navigation tech. Some of these creations have never been seen before! The scientists behind them declared that these technologies the key to our counter offensive; even I didn't know about their origins. Still, any military buff could tell this advancement in naval tech was too rapid and honestly, quite suspicious.

Then there's me. I’m done. I’m through. I exist, all by myself, in this dimly lit beach house. It stands alone on miles of untouched coastline, on the outskirts of a sprawling metropolis known as

Kovaru on the planet Bethany. The city's enormity often overwhelms me, but not here, not in my haven. Bethany’s solitary moon bathes the night in a peaceful soft blue light that dances on the ocean surface and seeps into my very soul.

This modest house isn't large - it doesn’t need to be. I’ve always been unnerved by too much empty space; it reminds me of rooms I once rented and left before the month was out. The essential rooms, bedroom, living area, bathroom, and kitchen, hold a comforting simplicity. My bedroom is always a mess with clothes strewn on the floor and an unmade bed that echoes an uncaring day’s end but what does that matter when I sleep on the couch, passed out with a bottle still in hand, half the time anyway.

Like now. I’m awake but still lying on that old couch, eyes following the map of cracks across the ceiling, the old wood of the cabin. The alcohol from night lingers in my system as I turn my head to gaze out at the night. It’s quiet. So quiet that I can hear the thoughts in my mind. The rhythmic sound of waves lapping at the shore and nocturnal birds singing from nearby trees are my only companions. That and the slight headache, hearing my pulse push blood through my eardrums thanks to years of hypertension.

Sometimes this quietness feels like an old friend, and sometimes like an adversary. A reminder of solitudes yet unshared. A tear escapes from my eye and trickles down my cheek - not one of sadness per se but one born out of an ache for something… more? Different? Probably just the depression. Maybe it's just the dance of moonlight over the water igniting dormant longings.

The pulsing blood flow matches the beat still ringing in my ears, I reflect on the night just past. The music was electric and it felt like I was alive for a few hours, with him. That night’s amusement. Yet after we stumbled back to my place, and I was through with him, I was again home alone. My eyes draw to the empty wine bottle that lay abandoned on the table; a few stray drops left behind from a near missed pour, another attempt to drown out the void with alcohol. Maybe I wasn't so alone after all.

I crossed my arms on the patios railing, raw and naked in the cool night, and laid the side of my head on my arms staring at the sea. This is me – in seclusion but never lonely, seeking refuge in loneliness while silently battling an ongoing struggle of my own. This is my life. Every night under a Bethany moon. Every weekend party of drunks and the soft drugs with a new bare chest to exhale my needs onto. Every morning with a Kovaru sunrise and a headache. In the familiar chaos of my room and amidst the faint murmurs of the sea. Me.

In the bowels of my dreams, the war came alive again. My time in service on Bethany and Caisteal was a dance with death, a lurking shadow never more than a step behind. Yet, few memories loomed larger than the rest. One was the day I stood before Kaisara, a warrior sculpted from legends and whispered fears, and found my life intertwined with hers forever.

That battle, it set itself apart, burned into my memory more sharply than any other. Never again during the war did I witness such mastery of skill or marvels of technology. She didn't just save my life. She drew on weapons and abilities I'd only ever heard mentioned in low voices around campfires, things most soldiers doubted were real. Elements that forged her into an invincible force on the battlefield.

It was her might that won us Bethany and we fell into step behind her, our faith blind but unwavering. Gratitude for our goddess of battle spilled from like water from an overflowing cup; yet it was tarnished by a gnawing wish. A wish that this Sun Jin Empire I had bled for wasn't borne solely out of military power's cold embrace. Another drink.

I wished for a people brought together not by mutual foes but by the beating hearts of its people; a unity that made us dependent on each other the way soldiers in a line depend on the fighter beside them, not just the cause in front of them. Despite everything, I swallowed back my disillusionment for perhaps that is what war does - it burying what I wanted beneath layers of cold realities. Another drink and another night attempting to bury my feelings in the chest fur with the warm embrace of another stranger.

That's why I fought. My home planet,

Caisteal, was the neighbor of

Bethany, same star system and everything, and I went to war here to stop the Systems Alliance from invading my home. Fortunately for me and my friends back home, Caisteal had negligible military value so they never attempted to move against it while occupying Bethany. They were having a hard time trying to control this planet alone. Bethany, a sprawling megacity like the System Alliance’s own

Amber Krowe.

At any rate, here I am. Retired. My years as a soldier earned me numerous medals that I displayed over my mantelpiece. With retirement, I got promoted to colonel - if I still served in the Army today with that rank, I would be commanding a regiment comprising thousands of soldiers. If stationed on a ship, I'd have my own air group. I wasn't sure how I felt about that. I liked being a captain - the small team and fighting alongside my pals became a new family to me. It felt like I wouldn't experience as much action as a colonel. Instead, all the credit for what others did would go to me and that just isn't right.

The other outstanding significant memory was the gunshot that changed my life.

With a heaving sigh I reluctantly dragged myself up to a sitting position on the couch. Exhausted and head swimming from the night's debauchery. I wanted to lay there forever, anything was better than facing what I knew lay ahead of me. As I stared blankly ahead, my thoughts slowly drifted away. The loud hum of a vehicle in the distance reeled me back in with a sudden jolt. Aircraft were always flying by at this hour, so why did it feel different?

My cell phone vibrated on the table and I clenched my eyes shut with a loud ugly moan from my mouth, wishing it would stop. No one ever calls me, let alone at this time of night, or morning, or whatever it was called right now. I hesitantly opened my eyes and checked who was calling; an unknown number. Seems I had missed several of these according to the screen. I answered it.

“Hello?”

A voice that could freeze the sun on its axis replied, “This is

Commander Trill from the Office of Orbital Defense.”

My eyes widened and I let out an internal groan. Of all the times for military personnel to come knocking on my door, why now? I hadn't spoken to anyone in the military for almost a year, not since they called me in for some project work. I tried my best to keep up a brave face as they continued, “I am trying to contact Colonel Rio Narro. Is she there?”

“Uh… no?” I said it with a stupid questioning tone like an idiot, something only I could manage in moments of panic.

“With whom am I speaking?”

Trying my best to put on a poker face and roll with his punches, I answered with a casual shrug-like tone, “Her roommate.”

The voice on the other side was silent for what seemed like eternity before he continued, “Do you know of any way we can get in immediate emergency contact with her?”

Without missing a beat I retorted, “Uh… no. Not really.” However, deep down within me was a battle between putting my foot down and shutting him off or just cooperating and getting it over with… Whatever it may be.

He remained silent again so I took it upon myself to break the silence as I fell backward onto the couch again. “Am I under arrest, Commander?”

He chuckled at my question before answering, “You are being summoned to an emergency conference aboard the

Esther. Please ready yourself to be away for at least a day or two.” A day or two, I would later learn, was fucking bullshit.

Pulling away from the receiver I rolled my eyes but still maintained that silly half-smile of mine and muttered under my breath, ‘who needs sleep anyway right?’ while cursing out loud to myself that I should have found the means to tell him to fuck off. Not tonight, Trill. I quickly changed into something more presentable and tied my hair back. Meanwhile, outside my window the humming sound I noted earlier was growing louder by the second.

“The Esther,” I whispered to myself. The name alone carried weight—flagship of the Sun Jin Navy, Kaisara’s personal vessel, a symbol of everything we’d clawed back from the Alliance. No one knew where the tech came from; it was too advanced, too alien to have been built in less than a decade. Just a mystery wrapped in a weapon.

Ten minutes later I was aboard the shuttle. Bulky, utilitarian, built to punch through atmosphere and fly back out again, not to impress anyone. It was cleaner than the ones I remembered from the war, but the panels and edges were all the same.

I strapped in. The harness cinched across my chest with that old familiar hug, the kind that used to mean something to me before my… nihilism. Outside the window, the night sky was thick with stars. Below, my cabin shrank until it disappeared. Was this taking me directly to the Esther? Any stop-overs at an orbital station? I stared out the window, the question of the phone call nagging at me. Why bother with the pretense of asking if the shuttle was already on its way? It wasn’t a request. It was a summons, and my consent had never been part of the equation.

I glanced across the aisle at the three feline-like soldiers,

Bethian soldiers, who were gazing over at me. One of them—the youngest—had his ears flat and his eyes fixed somewhere around my collarbone before he caught himself and looked sharply away, suddenly very interested in the hull plating. I raised an eyebrow.

“Something on your mind?” I asked. I turned my palms upward in my lap and tapped each claw tip to the pad of my thumb, one after another, cycling through them.

“No, ma’am,” the youngest said, their ears going pink at the tips.

The most confident of the three leaned forward with the easy grin of someone who’d rehearsed this. “Colonel Narro. I’ve heard stories. Fastest hands in the war, decorated marksman, hero of Bethany. That all true?”

I looked at him for a moment. “That’s what they say,” I said, and turned back toward the window. Outside, Bethany’s lights were already shrinking. A war hero. That’s what the medals said. I’d stopped arguing with the medals. “Hey, what were your orders regarding me?”

The same soldier answered, “To escort you to the Esther and make sure you attend a special session. If you tried refusing, we’d still take you by force; that’s our orders straight from the empress herself. I mean literally

Sun Jin Kaisara. She addressed us directly in the shuttle bay with Atomis. It’s beyond normal rank or procedure at this point.”

“So I don’t have much of a choice.”

“We’re just glad we didn’t have to chase you down, ma’am.” He studied me for a moment. “If you don’t mind me asking, are you okay?”

My fingers kept tapping. I closed my eyes and tilted my head. “Hungover. No idea what I’m doing here.” A tired scoff. “I don’t do this consultant shit anymore. Kaisara of all people knows that.”

My expression shifted to one of concern as I watched the stars out the window. What did Kaisara want with me? I was almost certain that there would be no way of refusal if this mission was important enough to require her direct orders. The last time I had seen her was years ago… did she even remember saving my life or was it merely part of just another battle for her? I had a flashback of her dropping from the sky and tearing through the SA soldiers in those city streets. I remember making her laugh, while we sat there catching our breath for a while. She made me feel calm and peaceful, even though I had just lost the other members of my fire team that I had just met the same day.

I could make out the faint buzz of the inertial dampeners kick in throughout the shuttle. They created a low-pitched humming sound that was barely audible, but my sharp ears picked it up easily. The system enabled self-sustaining gravity within the craft even if the main gravity systems were disabled. This way I wouldn't be thrown about or experience any changes in speed and direction when I floated inside. Otherwise, if these systems were disabled and we suddenly jumped to slipspace, everyone and everything inside would be instantly splattered against the back wall. Enough said? Yeah, suck on that imagery for a moment.

I undid my seatbelt and floated up a little when I pushed off the armrests. One of the soldiers noticed me looking toward the cockpit. After a moment, he grunted and nodded toward the flight deck door. I pushed off my seat, drifting forward to see what they saw. When it slid open, my eyes widened as I saw the sheer size of it. The Esther. It was hovering near one of Bethany's command stations with an aircraft carrier nearby. I had seen other carriers before but this one put them all to shame. I'd heard that other models were no longer than two kilometers in length, yet this one seemed to stretch at least fifty kilometers. It was breathtaking to behold.

I'd heard of plans to bring new capital ship types into service for the war against the Systems Alliance. They had unique roles, and some of them were almost as powerful as a full fleet. These plans all led up to Kaisara's next phase: the counterattack on the System Alliance's home planet, Amber Krowe.

The Esther was built in two halves. The upper was a single long shell of glossy armored alloy, smooth and unbroken as an eggshell—and for similar reasons. Beneath it, according to intel I’d seen, sat the largest sensor array ever constructed, capable of detecting vessels thousands of light years out. Accuracy scaled with target size and distance, naturally. A capital ship reads differently than a shuttle. I’ll leave it at that.

The lower half was where the ship showed its teeth. Docking bays gaped open along its flanks like the gills of something enormous and alive, weapons emplacements bristling between them in staggered rows. Support systems and cooling infrastructure webbed the underside in a lattice of conduit and plating. The command area sat tucked under the forward belly, almost modest-looking given everything around it. At the rear, four engines were mounted in a two-by-two formation that consumed most of the ship’s aft profile. Each one was wide enough that the upper shell had been cut away just to accommodate them, like a jacket tailored around something that didn’t quite fit inside it.

I understood the impulse behind building something like this, even if I didn’t agree with it. A space station could have done the job for a fraction of the cost. But cost wasn’t the point. ‘It isn’t meant to be cost-effective - it’s a huge dick’. Heh, a video game quote I heard someplace.

That kind of fear is its own weapons system. But still I worry. A bigger ship holds bigger guns. Bigger guns mean more unnecessary collateral damage.

Sometime later, I left the troop transport with my bag and took in the immense docking bay. There were peculiar looking fighters secured into the walls and ceiling. Shared the same sharp but smooth design language as the Esther itself. Newly designed? Purpose built to work hand in hand with the Esther itself? I could see the cockpits, engine systems, nothing too different there, but the rest looked next generation.

The weapons of Sun Jin guards, exotic handhelds, and space-faring technology appeared so much more sophisticated than what I remember seeing on Bethany during its liberation. Could this be the result of the collaboration of hundreds of races and cultures? Doubt filled me, any group possessing such advanced tech wouldn't have needed to join an Empire to begin with. They would have been running it. Like the systems of the Esther, sudden uncanny technological improvements. I’d seen schematics of handheld energy based weapons but hadn’t seen them fielded yet. All this stuff. The Systems Alliance might even know what's about to hit them, or if they did, were probably clamoring to get as much of it into their research and development labs as soon as possible, if they hadn’t already.

All of this, and somewhere out there a kid is going blind because her parents can’t afford the clinic visit. I know what it took to build something like this. I know what it displaced. I also know what the Systems Alliance does to planets that can’t defend themselves, that’s the exact reason I fought for Bethany, to defend Caisteal. So I kept walking. Told myself the math works out eventually. Told myself that enough times that I almost believed it.

The three Bethians picked up around me as I came through the outer entry. Their kits were older than what I’d seen on the hangar guards, scuffed at the joints, a generation behind, but they moved through the corridors like they’d grown up in them, which maybe they had. The passageways ran wide enough for vehicles, pale alloy walls carrying a faint vibration up through the floor. At every junction, color-coded placards stacked on top of each other pointed off toward sleeping quarters, medical, fabrication, small craft engineering. I quit reading them after a while. Through a long run of windows I caught a factory floor below us, the size of a small town, workers and automated systems threading through each other in patterns too exact to be accidental.

Two rail cars moved us forward across something like twenty minutes of ship, each one clean and quick and full of people who had somewhere to be that wasn’t looking at me. By the time we stepped off the second car, I’d stopped calling it a ship in my head. It had districts. It had a pulse.

The blast doors into the bridge were the tallest I’d walked through since boarding, reinforced alloy, edges beveled, the scarring along their frames the kind that comes from actual use. Past them, the bridge spread out like the inside of a skull, every surface working, every screen running data I couldn’t read fast enough to follow.

The tiered stations ran in arcs across the floor, officers working in clusters, most of them Bethian, a few species I didn’t recognize. The curved display wall dominated the forward view the way a coastline dominates a window, you looked at it before you decided to. Whatever it was showing, it was showing a lot of it. White uniforms throughout. Engineers, scientists, probably the best in their fields across the entire empire.

Outside the panoramic windows, space did nothing. Inside, everything moved, screens cycling, indicators blinking, personnel crossing between stations with the quiet urgency of people who already knew what they were doing. The contrast was hard to ignore.

Along one side, a row of rooms with frosted glass panels running floor to ceiling. Some were dark and empty. Others were lit and occupied—a cluster of officers around a table in one, a single figure at a display in another. The scale of it suggested the Esther didn’t just run military operations. It ran things. Disputes, logistics, policy. Whatever a city handles when it needs to handle something.

I nodded as Kaisara turned her head slightly toward me, watching me close the distance. I was wildly underdressed for this. Khaki cargo pants and a sweatshirt. To be fair, nobody mentioned the command bridge of the Esther when they woke me up.

“Colonel Narro.” She said it softly, a data pad held against her chest. I’d heard that voice in broadcasts, in interviews, filtered through speakers and secondhand recordings. Hearing it aimed directly at me was something different.

“Lady Kaisara.” I dipped my head. She gave a small nod toward her companion, a quiet ending to their meeting, and began walking toward the rear of the bridge, unhurried, a gesture trailing behind her that meant follow. I fell into step beside her without a word.

“It’s good to see you again, old friend.” One pat on the back, easy and brief, like we’d done this a hundred times. We had definitely not done this a hundred times. There is having friends in high places but holy shit.